Even ManU striker Wayne Rooney couldn’t fire up the team’s market debut. Shares ended flat at $14 as investors gave the debt-ridden club controlled by Malcolm Glazer a lukewarm welcome. Photo: REUTERS

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The owners of Manchester United just got a swift kick to the shins.

Shares of the world-famous British soccer team flopped in their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange — a dizzying blow for the Miami-based Glazer family, whose ownership has been demonized by fans as greedy opportunists.

The shares, priced at $14 a share — well below the $16 to $20 a share range that the Glazers had hoped for — closed after their first day of trading at exactly that price: $14.

That gives ManU a market value of $2.3 billion.

Underwriters were forced to prop up the price amid slack demand, according to reports, an uneasy reminder of Facebook’s underwhelming May 17 debut.

Analysts blamed the poor debut, in part, on the Glazer family’s plan to pocket half the $234 million in proceeds from the initial public offering — despite the fact that they saddled the team with a crippling debt load when they acquired it in 2005.

Critics likewise bristled at ManU’s controversial dual-class share structure, which allows the Glazers — who also own the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers — to maintain almost total control over operations.

“I don’t see much in it for the outside investor who has no control,” Tim Jenkinson, a professor of finance at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, told Reuters.

Some fans of the team — who in 2005 burned family patriarch Malcolm Glazer in effigy — cheered the busted IPO as they protested rising ticket prices and depleted funds to draft new players to support its cast of superstars like Wayne Rooney.